Strategy of mBank Group

The pillars of mBank Group’s strategy for 2016-2020 have been developed in response to the most important challenges faced by banks in terms of running business activities. According to mBank, these pillars include the client era, the mobility era and the efficiency era. At present, mBank focuses on these three pillars which are also to set the directions for the bank’s future operations.

Empathy is a quality, rarely associated with the financial sector. We use various tools in order to install empathy in our organisational culture, in our employees’ mindsets and in our processes and products. We want our clients to stay with mBank “forever” and recommend it to their friends and family, being satisfied with its services. In order to systematize and shape initiatives supporting the bank’s focus on its clients, the Management Board has appointed a Management Board Plenipotentiary for client-centricity culture and client relations.

As a bank, we operate in a complex and strictly regulated world. Legal regulations do not, however, address every challenge and dilemma faced by our employees. The bank’s market position, thousands of employees on board and millions of customers served pose a major challenge in terms of empathy-based approach. However, at the same time, they simultaneously allow us to promote the concept on a large scale.

We live in an era where the customer reigns supreme, being the focus of attention of most businesses. We concentrate our efforts on fulfilling our customers’ needs and solving their problems. In order to do so, we have defined four core requirements, which we apply to every customer-bank interaction:

• customer needs come first – we fulfil customers’ real needs, and solve their real problems;
• simplicity is the key – we work in a clear and customer-friendly manner, being almost inconspicuous;
• customer experience follows mBank’s brand – we create positive emotions in line with the brand positioning. We are the icon of mobility. We support our customers anytime, anywhere;
• trust – we make every effort to maintain a high level of trust and earn it with every decision we make.

By promoting empathy, mBank takes up, among others, the following activities:

People are at the core of our vision and strategy. Hence, we equip our employees with the skills to undertake this strategy and point them in the direction of our company’s development:

• We encourage our employees to visit other places in the company for quick “work experience”. Work experience is organised in places where the bank meets customers: in retail and corporate branches, and the contact centre;
• We encourage employees to use our products and become ambassadors of our brand. We are especially proud of the fact that a number of our employees actively use the mobile application;
• In order to help our employees better understand the bank’s strategy, we have created the Snapshot. It is a set of open-ended questions together with answers, dealing with customers’ legitimate expectations from the bank and the desired shape of cooperation within the organisation;
• The organisation culture is also developed with the help of agents of change, who include approximately 80 ambassadors from the head office, 30 ambassadors from the corporate branches and 40 ambassadors from the retail branches;

• The position of Chief Ethics Officer was appointed by the Management Board. For further information see Ethics, values and compliance;
• In mBank, empathy also means supporting our employees. In order to meet their various needs, we offered our employees remote working privileges, so called “home office”. Annual engagement surveys (which covers the vast majority of employees) highlight directions for further desired changes. Every three months, the Management Board holds open staff meetings, which are broadcast and thus available to everyone interested. Their objective is to comment on results, discuss strategic projects and answer potential questions. In the previous year, we invited more than 200 bank managers to take part in empathy-dedicated workshops. Diversified groups enabled them to talk about emotions and active listening. We also carried out a round of countrywide training sessions on fighting discrimination and workplace harassment.

mBank’s mobile application, launched in 2014, has won a large group of new users over the last four years and has been enriched with a number of new features that cater for the needs of clients. More than 1.5 million clients are systematically banking via mBank’s mobile app. Also, nearly 2.0 million are using mobile solutions via the application, light version of the transaction service or log into the standard version of online banking on their smartphones. In 2018, the app was given a new look and feel, with easier navigation and a range of new features. In particular, card and limit management underwent a major overhaul, involving: simpler card transaction limits, an option to set a higher one-off limit for a given type of transaction valid until the end of the day, temporary card block, block on foreign and contactless transactions and information on rejected card transactions. New app features were introduced to users in 2017, including: the quick cash loan with a credit decision available in one minute from filing an application and the online expert service, which allows users to connect with mBank via text or video chat.

Furthermore, we introduced a number of new features and improvements which are described in the section of the report devoted to our customer relations.

In 2018, we started cooperation with Digital Teammates in the area of robotising back-office processes. Robots have been working in the operations since the beginning of 2018 – with particular focus on the tasks of the following teams: Payments, Monitoring and Instructions, where they perform tasks such as recording costs, fees and commissions, registering motions in the application, and filling in customer data in the process of handling insurance policies.

In the previous year, Operations and IT Area focused on implementing the DigitAll programme. Our main aim was to extend the digitalised back-office in mBank. We learned how to enhance the platform used to manage digital documentation (ECM) and we are preparing a list of first candidates who could use the system. We also verified the best market solutions within efficient process management. A new process platform (BPMS) is in the final stage of implementation. Moreover, we worked on a catalogue of minor optimisations and automations, which saved time and money as well as reduced the number of print-outs and limited the risk of error. For example, we replaced paper applications submitted by brokers in the process of handling mortgage loans with electronic ones. We introduced a more advanced reporting process in the operations in order to, knowing the costs of particular processes, identify priorities and achieve better results from their transformations.

For corporate clients, we have been implementing a project that enables us to digitalise the customer-bank relationship. The aim is to speed up the service and reduce the bank’s workload. The project focuses on integrating critical processes of servicing customers in central units and on digitalising and improving activities, whilst maintaining the quality of customer service in the branches and actively involving client advisors in promoting new functionalities of the mCompany Net transactional system. In 2018 we centralised processes from 10 branches. At the beginning of 2019, we are planning to transfer processes from another 19 branches to the operations area.

We are also working on improving the standard of services rendered to individual customers subject to enforcement proceedings. Apart from fulfilling our duties as a bank, we are focused on enhancing the quality of information we provide to our customers. We are increasing the level of execution-related expertise among our Contact Centre employees. We have simplified the language we use in communication with customers when handling their instructions and complaints in this area. In addition, we are working on streamlining the process of granting mortgage loans.

At mBank, we take every effort to make our solutions intuitive for their final users and easy to maintain and develop for IT specialists. We are also trying to streamline interbank processes with the solutions introduced in 2018 under our offer’s advancement, for example, Payment Assistant (a service allowing its users to settle monthly bills with a ready transfer order, which only needs to be approved by the customer). Enhancements made in the bank’s anti-fraud processes to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and security standards release employees monitoring transactions from operational tasks and support them in their work towards increasing security in the sector.

Our customer advisors benefit from the credit-worthiness analysis model for merchants without prior credit history and the model using purchase sequences to predict credit events for retail customers. Another example of an application facilitating data analysis is the “Client360” tool (“Klient360”), which makes it possible to analyse the relationship between customers and to find the geographical location of a transaction. The applications reduce the workload of our employees, thanks to which they can be more efficient and dedicate themselves stronger to building better relationships with customers.

mBank’s achievements related to increasing effectiveness are appreciated not only by its customers and employees, but also by market experts. This was reflected in the award mBank won in October 2018 for “the first implementation of the Informatica Big Data technology in the Polish banking”, granted at the Informatica Summit conference. Big Data is used to create a system for management reporting, which allows thorough customer analysis and development of business models. It is also applied in analyses and simulations at the level of individual contracts and customers. The said implementation made it possible to reduce the costs of infrastructure for data analysis.